Category: Preseason
(page 2 of 3)

Saturday, October 5th, about ten members of our team participated in the third annual OSMOCES conference in the IIT Rice Campus in Wheaton. (OSMOCES stands for Open Source Mechatronics Outreach and Creative Exchange Symposium, and is run by the Fox Valley Section of the American Society of Mechanical Engineers). The conference had four sequences of lectures and presentations that a participant could follow: General Interest, Robotics, Electrical, and Programming. There were also workshops on arduinos and soldering, among other topics like animating in Blender.

Attending one of the presentations

All of the team members attended a few of the lectures, but some actually presented as well. Mr. Schmit gave a presentation on computational modeling with vPython and its applications in education. Mr. Rowzee led a discussion and presentation of underwater robotics, featuring the ROV built by the school’s Marine Engineering Team. James Zhu, a sophomore programmer, gave a presentation on GIT, describing how it had helped manage and organize the team and its code. We also set up a table where people could learn more about FIRST Robotics and our team.

Showing off Sally

During the afternoon portion of the event, we took Sally out to the back of the building and shot Frisbees with a few interested elementary and middle school students. We answered their questions, had a lot of fun, and hopefully inspired future participation in FIRST!

An impromptu Q&A with a few people who were interested

The conference was a great opportunity for our team, both to share our knowledge and experiences and to gain new insight into different parts of the world of STEM. It might not be a common way for teenagers to spend their Saturdays, but OSMOCES was interesting and fun. Thanks for participating, team 3061!

Friday September 20th, about fifteen members of Huskie Robotics had the opportunity to participate in Naperville North’s homecoming carnival. Our first large outreach event of the year, the carnival was visited by many families of the students and teachers at North, as well as people from around the area.

.

Team 3061’s activity was “Frisbee Fun”: For one ticket, carnival goers could throw a Frisbee into the target (the less exciting option), for two, they could use Sally to shoot a Frisbee, and for three, they could shoot three Frisbees from Sally. Kids who knocked over the water bottle placed inside the target won small, windup robots, and everyone who played got an eraser as a prize.

Huskie Robotics welcomes the Class of 2017 to Naperville North High School. Look in your Enter with Pride packet for a flyer from us and stay tuned to announcements and posters announcing our meetings this fall.

Can’t wait until then? The flyer is below. If you want to see the team in action this summer, we will be competing at the Rock River Off-Season Competition on Saturday, August 3.